


From One Ghost to Another

by LittleRaven



Category: Star Wars: Rebels, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Tag, Episode: s04e15-16 Family Reunion – and Farewell, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-25
Updated: 2019-04-25
Packaged: 2020-02-04 09:09:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18601450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRaven/pseuds/LittleRaven
Summary: Everything comes back, sometimes in a different way. Before heading out to find Ezra, Ahsoka engages in conversation.





	From One Ghost to Another

**Author's Note:**

  * For [outruntheavalanche](https://archiveofourown.org/users/outruntheavalanche/gifts).



“A wise Jedi once told me, ‘It’s not about you.’” Anakin looked gentle, and that broke Ahsoka’s heart all over again. She still reached for his blue hand and let him give her a hug. 

“You have to know it.” His words over her shoulder melded with the hum of his presence; she could hear him in the Force, stronger than ever now. Just as urgent in the arms which held her while she cried, and Ahsoka marveled at it, Anakin’s ability to surpass the natural limits all Jedi must accept. And he was a Jedi, wasn’t he? How else? She reminded herself that there was more to the Force than the teachings of their Order—and she had no wish to call him by a title he had rejected, not without knowing how he felt about it. 

“You have to know,” he repeated, “that you did the right thing. You had to leave. And you didn’t owe it to me to come back.”

“I do know that.” He drew back, enough to look at her face. 

“It wasn’t my role.” She’d accepted it, and the pain of one more loss. Ahsoka had felt like she was grieving him a second time and now, it was a third. He was truly dead. She met his eyes. “But I wish it could’ve been.”

They were silent, then, but he spoke again. 

“It was my role. I never thought I could go back. Not really. I wanted you to join me instead, and you wouldn’t.”

She’d come very near to it. Ahsoka remembered his goading, the hatred that had driven her against him. _Anakin Skywalker is dead._ If she hadn’t broken his mask. If he hadn’t called out her name. 

He was still looking at her. She knew he understood, and of that, they said nothing.

Instead, he continued. 

“So I didn’t join you either. I never went back until I knew it was going to kill me.” 

Anakin shrugged slightly with his last words, though he didn’t let her go.

Ahsoka felt him rub her back. It was a good thing he’d never had a problem with her crying. 

She looked at him closely through the blur of her tears. Could he cry? He could before, she knew, though he preferred not do it. Could he now? Was a ghost beyond that need—as he must surely be beyond the need to hide it; if you couldn’t let yourself be when dead, when could you, and isn’t that ironic, that letting go brought him back here as himself, not a whisper of his consciousness dissolving into the Force—or could he still express that, the way he was here, speaking to her, holding her, watching her in return? 

She looked, and she lifted her hand from around his blue waist, the hum of him under her skin going through her heart, and rested it on his cheek.

She smiled as the hum grew stronger. “Took you long enough,” Ahsoka said, and felt Anakin smile back.


End file.
